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Holo-bars
Narrated History Ahh! But yes! All good stories must start in a bar. And that is how this story began… if my memory serves me right. The problem with bar stories is, that they tend to be a bit troublesome to remember; not only in the sense of beginning. This story probably started with a group of good friends… more or less, maybe goodish. The kind of friends you meet in a bar. Move on, shall we? Yes. You see, for someone coming from earlier centuries, holo-bars and their history might seem a bit confusing and the current concept might come off as… unintuitive. In early 21st century in the area of current Neo-Hansaetic Leagues domain, the youth consistently drank less and less every decade. The conservatives were proud of the new generation, since they assumed, that the young ones had discovered some old values of responsibility to live by. The liberals also thought that this was a good trend for legalizing all the drugs. Basically no one with modest access to democratic oppression saw it coming, when the truth emerged: there had been a media generation shift and the new generation really enjoyed stimulants of the mind -- you know, consuming “power-ups” like Super Mario. In their eyes, alcohol was the kind of power-up, which gave you star power, but also gave you a horrible debuff, the morning after. While the debuffs of other drugs were merely caused by impurities… and the fact that they had been largely exaggerated by alcohol industry… and the fact that some biohackers had counter engineered all kinds of alleviation medicines to counter the debuffs caused by brain chemistry and vitamin imbalances… you get the point. The alcohol industry had been inventing debuffs for alcohol long before Jesus had turned water to wine, but with little luck. It was much easier to remove flaws from a synthetic newly legalized drugs than to change something mankind had loved enough for thousands of years. Considering, that total days spent on hangovering by the mankind was estimated to be around 2,500 billion years by the end of year 2050 (total cumulative amount of humans beings having been alive back then was 113 billion, of which 8% were still alive). Total days of skipped important work due to alcohol was 76 times greater than due to bad weather and 42 times greater than having a “sickness”. All in all, the mankind really seems to love alcohol and it seems to be more natural part of our daily lives, since we have already conquered the nature of weather and sickness, but for some reason skipped conquering the alcohol. Sure, there has been times, when we almost conquered the alcohol. Almost. You see, in mid 21st century things were looking really grim for the alcohol corporations. Recreational drug usage was done every weekend by many and that seemed to be lesser problem for everyone, than the alcoholics. Nobody wanted to be like an alcoholic; even all the rockstars were non-alcoholic pussies. The electric guitar had become a hipster toy, instead of being a symbol of a rebel heart pulsing with alcohol fumes and adolescence and almost safe sexual experiences. So, there was this Finnish guy, who had made some millions from his earlier start-up success and now he wanted to work for “8-bit Brewery”, because he loved the idea of being rich and able to work in an industry, which required certain level of high craftsmanship. And sure, he loved his beer, a dying tradition to be kept safe for the next generations to learn, even though his generation was much worse than all the other generations before him. Everything used to be cooler. His undeniable programming skills started whispering him ideas. Having made his millions with a “dating app for dogs” based on something, which remotely resemble artificial intelligence also outside of the sales pitch slides, there was something brewing deep within his subconsciousness, which was worried about the fate of beer. He wanted a revenge on the synthetic drugs! And he did. You see, the synthetic drugs were not really that superior. And then we also had those funny things called Quantum Computers, which were supposed to be superior to traditional computers, but only rare breed of humans actually used them to anything but simulating old transistor computer programs. The “8-bit Brewery” had one house special beer, which involved a spicing up a regular beer with few drops of “Quantum Freezed Alcohol”; they had bought a Quantum Computer fridge (those machines need to run in near zero Kelvins) to implement the concept. Of course, they learned, that alcohol frozen that badly becomes merely hydrogend and oxygen, but they never told that to the customers and used this “blessed” bottles of cheap booze to do the trick. Everyone thought that Quantum Freezed Alcohol made the beer taste significantly better and paid double price for it. Of course the IT-millionaire owned a Quantum Computer and was allowed to use the fridge after hours. And one day he was playing this virtual reality game, which needed a Quantum Computer to entangle with your brains; classic computers didn’t cope well with quantum information concepts, such as entanglement, which basically means, that the algorithms compress your thought patterns after a small calibration program and syncs it with the world database and can thus actually pretty accurately predict your thinking and very efficiently predict your thoughts. One day he had been playing the virtual reality game a bit too many hours trying solve an annoying problem. He had become frustrated and angry. And eventually he raged for his colleague for no good reasons. After he realized, that his behavior was out of place, he blamed the game for it. It wasn’t the real me speaking, it was the game. Wait a second. It wasn’t the real me speaking… it was the Alcorithms! And what do you know. He founded a new start-up and eventually became the multi-billionaire who had saved alcohol… wait a second, you ask? Aren’t we just talking about some Virtual Reality games, not alcohol here? Yes we are, but hold your horses, I am getting there. The great invention of the soon-to-be billionaire was rediscovering the essence of alcohol. It is not the hangovers, neither is it the taste of fermentation. It is the endless sources of excuses for misbehavior… so if you would create games with disclaimers, like “might be harmful for your behavior”, the young adolescent still trying to figure out the behavioral boundaries of the society, would love those games. Even better, if the games would consume “so huge amounts of Quantum Computing power”, that only “holo bars” could allow to provide for their customers against a price… when consumers can not buy the devices themselves, you can rent such services for them, if they come over to your bar and pay some neat money. A perfect excuse for the young ones to network in a bar like environment, like in the good old days. While the billionaire managed to save the world from non-decadence and got the next generation of youth into alcorithms, which would “destroy your brains” according to some parental psychologists, he never lived to see the day, when alcohol became popular again. Quite the opposite. Most of the Holo Bars of early 22nd century sold any alcohol. Some sold coffee and energy drinks. However, the collective consciousness had noticed that something important was missing from the formula of the alcohol. The misbehavior alcorithms didn’t cause hangovers, because they didn’t have to. However, that made a problem, when people overused the alcorithms. So after one generation had tried not to listen to the parental psychologists, the next one started to listen them and suggested, that the mechanisms of Alcorithms should be thoroughly investigated. In the lights of this new research, it seemed, that most people didn’t want to act like they were drunk all the time, because the conflicts caused by such a behavior would cause too much stress. What alcohol did naturally, was that it made your mind open for conflicts, which made the conflicts to write less accurate memories, while intoxicated… it also naturally reduced the amount of overall memory prints stored… and it also naturally caused mild depression the morning after, which again lessens the brain functions attempting to persist long-term memories. So the perfect cure for not fucking up your brains with Alcorithms actually was to get modestly fucked up with Alcohol, while playing those mind boggling Virtual Reality games with your friends in a cozy atmosphere testing the boundaries of your friendship and everyone around you. Human beings seem to need conflicts and fake resolutions, when they are young and don’t have childlike responsibilities to take care of. That’s all there is. Previous Description Holo-bars became mainstream in the 2070's when political atmosphere took it up against alcohol abuse. First generations of holo-bars were not much different from Cafe's where you played with Virtual Reality toys. Such cafe's were made popular by politically directed public demand and indeed, people started resenting hang-overs and other chemical substances, which messed up with your brain chemistry. People became fresh. Kind of. You see, for some reason it is hard-wired in our culture, that we tend to measure each other, for some very weird reason it seems to be essential for us to have the possibility of making the "bad choice" and be part of the "we make up our own mind about the dangerous stuff"-crew. In 2073 most of the live music shows were merged with mixed reality concepts, however, some mixed reality concepts actually were using such strong information patterns, that they actually programmed your brain for non-you behavioral urges. In a sense there is nothing new; you need an excuse to skip work for yourself, so that you can actually come up with more clever excuse to skip work. You need excuses to misbehave in your relationship; misbehave as citizen, as a friend and in all walks of life: we really need excuses to test non-deterministic behavior patterns. The good citizens avoid behaving in non-deterministic ways, because society needs predictability and certainty. The bad citizens, they do everything they can in order to have their own way, to know the "more real" behavior patterns, which are free from societal constructs, which authorities try to use for our imprisonment. In late 2080's mental health became a basic human right; the irony has it, that in 2090's all kinds of abusive virtual reality brain-rewirement programs had been tried by 78% of the population and frequently used by 26%. This is what efficiently also made the Vaenam Oaks unstable; the humanity had started a gamble with it's mind by abusing cybernetic opportunities for their own demise. However, it is not clear that it would actually be all that bad. New forms of art, philosophy and political criticism emerged in much faster pace from these, who challenged the safety of the society; even in such volume, that they actually have the progressive control of our future.